


you'd be like heaven to touch (i want to hold you so much)

by kiriya



Category: Kamen Rider Build
Genre: Angst, Ends with Episode 39, Happy Ending, M/M, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 09:26:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14912771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiriya/pseuds/kiriya
Summary: “Consider it an experiment,” Sento says. “Science says sharing a bed with a partner is good for your health.”





	you'd be like heaven to touch (i want to hold you so much)

 “Move over, fugitive.” 

 Banjou, not quite asleep, ignores him.

 In the daylight, Banjou would protest with ardor, but now the toil of battle and the hours since sunset weigh heavily on his body. His mind is clouded with exhaustion, and his limbs ache. A pair of rough hands shakes him, and Banjo groans, inadvertently exposing that he’s awake. Banjou defends himself by squeezing his eyes tighter and and pulling the covers over his head. 

 “Move over,” Sento still insists.

Banjoy reluctantly turns over and pulls the covers down to his neck. When Banjou opens his eyes, Sento is hovering over him covered in shadow. In the dark, Banjou notices Sento’s not wearing his trademark khaki-colored coat, just boxers and a bright t-shirt with an anime caricature of Misora’s idol persona. Looking at it burns his tired eyes. 

“What are you wearing?” Banjou asks.

“So filthy,” Sento replies with a smirk. Banjou wants to die. He’s never met anyone who smirks like Sento does, like he obviously knows something the world doesn’t. “These are my pajamas.” 

Banjou looks out the window behind him. The sky is blue, but there’s no sun yet. 

“What time is it?” 

“Five. I’ve been researching all night.” 

Another good night’s sleep has evaded him. Before Sento came in, Banjou had been wide awake, feeling the weight of every second that passed. In the darkness, the hours had felt like days, and all he could think about was the dead people lying in Touto’s streets because their team allowed themselves to be fooled again. 

Last night, Misora caught him pounding out his frustrations on a flour bag in the kitchen. Maybe it was his incrementally rising Hazard Levels, but these days he was too wired to sleep. And when he can’t sleep, he thinks too much, and when he thinks too much, Banjou’s chest gets tied up in anxious knots as he thinks about the possibility of failing. So instead of trying to sleep, Banjou drains his thoughts and adrenaline into punches and wears himself out to the point of exhaustion. 

 Banjou envies Sento’s genius mind. It’s too busy to stop and think about how screwed they might be.

 “Why the hell are you here?” Banjo asks. 

 “Gentoku is in my bed,” Sento, ever the selfless hero, explains. 

 “What about the lab?”

 “Grease wants to sleep where Mii-tan naps.”

 “Gross,” Banjou notes with his face scrunched up in disgust. “Isurugi’s room?” 

“... is Sawa’s now.” 

 Banjou sighs, resigned. Even with Isurugi gone, Nascita is less of a shop and more of a haven for lost souls. The base of operations for war-forsaken misfits who want to try their hand at being heroes. 

 “... Can’t you sleep on the floor?”

 Sento mock-pouts. “You’d really be so cruel to me?” 

 “I’m in my underwear,” Banjou protests. 

 “I could care less.”

 Banjou huffs, indignant but defeated. Banjou moves over and tries not to think about how exposed he is. He turns away, resolute to not look at Sento. Banjou feels the weight of the mattress shift under him. Banjou holds the covers close to his naked body like a shield. 

“You could have chosen someone else,” Banjou says into the dark. 

“Would you have?” Banjou thinks about it for a moment. He wouldn’t have. Sento yanks at the covers, exposing him to the cold night air. “Don’t hog the sheets like you hog the hero spotlight, okay?” 

“Screw you, I’m naked!” Banjo exclaims, yanking the covers back. 

“Your underwear is cute,” he says. Even though Banjou’s not looking, he knows Sento is smiling. “It’s like your flannels.” 

 “Shut up,” Banjou grumbles as he adjusts for comfort. He can feel Sento moving too.

“Goodnight, Banjou.”

“Yeah, Goodnight, Sento.” 

Banjo still doesn’t sleep, and the seconds are more achingly elongated than those before it.  

The small bed is hot with Sento in it, like Banjou’s transformed using Magma Knuckle, and their shared pillow is surrounded in Sento’s scent. Banjou tries hard to compartmentalize that he’s almost naked, but it’s hard with Sento’s warm breath tingling the back of his neck. 

He tries turning over. Banjo thinks rather than counting sheep he can count the rise and fall of Sento’s chest (before Banjo tried to occupy his mind by rattling off the names of Full Bottles.) Instead, Banjo is forced to take in Sento’s sleeping face. During the day, Banjo can look into Sento’s eyes and see the cogs in his brain moving a thousand miles a minute, but in sleep, he looks peaceful, unthinking and untethered by the war or the sins of his past. 

Banjo wishes he were so lucky. At least he’s thinking about Sento, and not the earth being ripped up from underneath him. 

Sento always keeps those thoughts at bay. Before, Banjou had dreams that began as nightmares in the tank, before the glass was shattered and Sento stood above him as Build. Even Banjou’s uneasy subconscious knows as long as the bad guys are here, Sento will be here too.

Banjou’s life before Sento saved him doesn’t seem real anymore, like a dream just out of memory, a blur. Before, Banjou was a causeless rebel who never worried about the scheme of things outside the inconsequential realm of his mundane life. Now, his world was something dangerous and bizarre and Banjou doesn’t fight to become stronger for himself anymore but for everything else. The soil in Hokuto, the people of Touto, and Nabeshima’s family in Seito.

_Because of him._

Cautiously, Ryuga reaches out to touch Sento’s chest. Sento places his hand over his and Ryuga nearly jumps. 

“Can’t sleep?” 

Banjo swallows. “Yeah. I can’t stop thinking.”

A smile tugs at Sento’s lips in the darkness. “I didn’t know you could think in the first place.”

Banjou’s tone is hard, “How can you joke at a time like this?”

_How can I be more like you? How do I stop being so fucking scared?_

“Turn over,” Sento says. Banjou scowls and follows the order. Banjou stiffens when he feels the weight of Sento’s chest pressed against his back and an arm around his waist. Sento’s warm.  

“What the hell are you doing?” 

“Consider it an experiment,” Sento says. “Science says sharing a bed with a partner is good for your health.”

“I, uh - Are we that kind of partner?” 

“Why? Is not ok?” 

 _No, it’s dangerous_.   
  
Banjou knows if he accepts this he’ll have to stop dancing around whatever it is between them. This will be the moment where he has to stop excusing every profound moment they’ve shared: _it’s what friends do_. He’ll need to give a name to the inexplicable thing that passes between them when they catch each other’s eyes and smile, whatever force that makes them tell Evolt how much they’ve grown, how much they need each other, how they make each other stronger.  

But Sento’s chest against his bare back feels warm and inviting, like a fire in a snowstorm. Banjou takes a deep breath, as if he’s going to dive underwater, and relaxes against him. He feels like sleep could wash over him at any minute. 

“No, it’s safe. You’re safe,” Banjou says, grabbing Sento’s hand, cautiously testing another boundary. Sento responds by lacing his fingers in his.

“You know,” Sento says softly into his shoulder. The sensation makes him shudder. “You look much less like a delinquent without those braids.” 

Sento is always either overtly sincere or overtly smug, and it drives Banjo crazy.

“Shut up.”  

.

“Banjo!” Misora exclaims the next morning when she barges into his room. The back of the door banged against the wall, jolting him awake. “Do you want-“

Banjou sits up, revealing his state of undress. Misora stops in her tracks and turns slightly pink. Banjo quickly looks in between her and the form in the covers next to him, who is still fast asleep. 

 “Oh,” Misora observes, suddenly deflated. Otherwise, she seems unfazed.  “Are you two a couple now?” 

“I don’t know.” 

Banjo really didn’t. There was something without a name between them, intense and undeniable. Camaraderie made them seem like colleagues, and friendship seemed too juvenile. All of them were family now, but the bond they shared was something... different.

Romance. Until last night, they had never played with the boundaries of that realm. It felt a little juvenile too, like they were schoolboys with crushes, but what they did had felt _right._

“Ok... Have you been getting more sleep?”  

Banjou had fallen asleep tangled in Sento within an hour. 

“Yeah, kinda.”  

“Good. Sawa’s making breakfast. Are you two gonna come down?”

Banjou wonders if he can speak for Sento. “Maybe.” 

Misora closes the door, and Banjou lays his head back on the pillow. He wraps an arm around Sento, and in his sleep, Sento nuzzles him closer. Banjou closes his eyes and leans into the embrace. 

.

 

“Did you sleep well last night?” Sento asks, not looking up from the table, when Banjou comes down the stairs into the lab. The back of his hair is sticking up like alert puppy ears and Sento’s surrounded by equations and components that Banjou, who barely finished high school, can’t understand. 

“Kinda,” Banjou answers. He passed Sawa and Misora upstairs, chatting exuberantly, but Kazumin is still asleep on the cot. Gentoku had taken a single black coffee from the moldy coffee maker and left.

“So it was a successful experiment?” Sento asks. The circuit board Sento’s fiddling with sparks with electricity. Sento had been working on the Evolt Driver relentlessly for the last day and a half, ever since he found the components within the Bottle Purifier. Sento drags his plastic googles from around his neck onto his face. He’s so in his natural state, so focused and so unapologetically dorky, it hurts his chest. 

He forces himself to look away. 

“Yeah,” Banjou says curtly. “You look like a geek.”  

“Hmph. There’s nothing geeky about lab safety.” 

.

That night, they’re lying next to each other clothed, staring at the ceiling together.

“You talk in your sleep,” Banjou remarks. 

“What do I say?,” asks Sento.

“I don’t know,” Banjou replies. “Some science garbage.” 

“That garbage saves lives. Besides, you snore like an elephant.”

“You’re such a liar,” Banjo says with a smile. Stress and exhaustion don’t weigh on him like before, and tonight, he can laugh. Banjo shifts under the covers and turns over to look at him. “Are you nervous?” 

Sento had finally finished the Evolt Driver. Tomorrow, they were making the exchange for the Prime Minister. 

“I don’t need to be,” Sento clarifies as he turns to face him. Banjo envies him. Sento’s genius mind approaches nigh unwinnable situations with new gadgets and new strategies, not fear like a normal human being. Sento never thinks maybe he can’t do it; he thinks himself an unstoppable force for which there’s no immovable object to match. “RabbitRabbit is perfect.” 

“Evolt has tricked us before,” Banjou reminds him. 

Sento releases an amused huff. Banjou can feel it on his face. “We didn’t know everything back then. Besides, I’m a genius. If tomorrow is a battle of intelligence, Evolt will lose.” 

“I guess,” Banjou replies. It’s hard to gauge Sento’s sincerity through his guise of arrogance. 

“You guess? I thought you had more faith in me.”  

The words create a flutter in his chest. Something foreign and nauseatingly heartfelt. 

“I do.” 

 .

When Sento is poisoned, Banjou doesn’t leave his side.

 “I won’t let him do this to you,” Banjou says when they decide to trade Pandora’s Box for the antidote. “You’re the hero, alright? I can’t do this without you.”

 A lazy, cheshire-like smile breaks out on Sento’s vein-covered face. “I can’t believe it took me getting poisoned for you to accept that you’re my sidekick.” 

For three nights, Banjo stays up in the lab, watching over Sento as he sleeps on the cot. He was used to these sleepless nights now, waiting for the next battle, wondering if the sunrise will bring the day where it all ends. 

 “Sento…” Banjo says quietly, the night before he has to confront Evolt.

 “Yes?” Sento replies from the cot. 

 “In case something happens tomorrow, I have to-“ 

 “Shut up,” Sento interjects. He grabs his Banjo’s hand, and Ryuga wonders if it’s greedy of him to want more. “Tell me when the war’s over.” 

“What?”  

“It’s a promise,” Sento explains. “That we’ll win. That we’ll bring love and peace. Tell me then... Besides, the hero always get his love interest at end.”

 _Love interest_. The words make Ryuga’s heart hammer in his chest. 

There’s a few seconds of solemness before Sento speaks again, “I’m tired of you hovering over me.” 

“Don’t screw with me. I’m not leaving.” 

“That’s not what I meant.” 

“Huh?”

“Poison isn’t contagious, musclebrain.”

Banjou thinks about it for a moment.

“Right.”  

Banjou carefully crawls under the covers with him. While he’s getting comfortable, Sento turns his back towards him. Banjou puts an arm around him and holds Sento’s hand close to his chest. Holding him is new, but he likes it. 

“I have something to tell you too,” Sento whispers. 

“Yeah?” Banjou asks, hopeful. 

“I was kidding about your braids. They suit you.” 

Banjou smiles against his neck. Slowly, his eyelids start to droop and sleep takes him. 

.

 “Less competition for Mii-tan,” Grease grumbles when the group finds them entangled in the morning.

 Sawa smacks him. 

 .

After Evolt leaves his body and takes Sento’s, Banjou comes home to an empty room. As soon as he closes his door, Banjo collapses against the back of it and sobs.

Banjo is like a glacier, strong and sturdy until he’s collapsed in one moment. Banjo cries like he’s wanted to all this time: when Kasumi died, when Sento was poisoned, when Nabeshima didn’t recognize his own daughter. Hot tears roll down his cheeks like they never did those sleepless nights, where all he thought about was Japan being destroyed like ancient Mars and his friends fading from existence like Grease’s. 

 _He’s gone._  

A knock at the door startles him. 

“Banjou…” Misora says tentatively through the door. 

Banjou wipes his face and sniffles. “Yeah?,” He asks hoarsely. His throat is dry from yelling at Evolt. 

“Do you want to bring your mattress into my room?” 

Banjo slams his fist again the wall. He hates this, that he’s become the kind of person who needs other people. 

Many times it feels wrong, like he’s playing pretend, like hasn’t changed at all. He’s still the same selfish idiot, who's just going through the motions, following Sento’s lead because he has no where else to go. 

 _I can’t do this without you._  

Banjou’s not a real hero like Sento, who’s genuine enough to believe in an idiot like him.

“Yeah,” Banjou replies, dragging himself up from the ground. 

“He missed you too,” Misora offers as they heave the mattress from the top of his bed. 

 That morning, Banjou eyes burn, bleary and red, as watches the sky turn from black to blue. 

.

The day is dwindling to an end. Physically and emotionally, the residents of Nascita are exhausted. 

Banjou’s sitting back in a chair with his arms crossed, while Katsuragi works and Misora finishes up her newest stream (Amongst this mess, they were a household of five and had to get money somehow). Grease is gushing over Misora’s fake cute girl voice, and Gentoku is doing what Banjou can best describe as ‘lurking.’

Katsuargi stops his work. “Where do I sleep?” 

“With me,” Banjou replies automatically. 

 Banjou could hear the proverbial record scratch. Everyone stopped what they were doing and exchanged looks. 

“I see…,” says Katsuragi. 

“I can show you,” Banjou offers.

He guides Katsuragi up two stories to his room. Banjou is tense around him. He doesn’t trust the man, and the way he wears Sento’s face with such a different demeanor unnerves him. Katsuargi is arrogant like Sento is, but his excitement for heroism and learning new things is dead. Even the man’s name makes Banjou uneasy. Banjou had spent so much time thinking about that name in prison. Banjou hopes that Sento is in there, somewhere. Banjou just needs to do or say the right thing for Sento to come out and affectionally call him an idiot and reassure him everything was going to be okay.

“Just take my bed,” Banjou instructs as he presses the door open. 

“It’s strange,” Katsuragi says, with Sento’s same narcissistic blasé. “How I could fall in love with you. I’ve always known I like men, but I’ve always been too focused for relationships... To think I’d start caring in the middle of a war, with a young man like you no less. I have two master’s degrees in Theoretical Physics and Mechanical Engineering. Did you even graduate high school? You’re a danger to all of us. Irrational, volatile, with the DNA of what we’re trying to defeat. A logical person would have killed you already... but I guess that face is hard to resist…”   
  
“Don't fuck with me, alright?,” Banjou can feel his skin getting hot with anger. "You’re not him.” 

Katsuragi sighs. “The more I talk to you the more I realize that.” 

Katsuragi closes the door, and Ryuga huffs like an angry dragon. He wants to fucking punch something. 

“Banjou,” Banjou turns at the voice. Misora’s standing at the end of hall in the pajamas from her night time stream. “Are you ok?”

“I’m fine. Katsuragi just pisses me off.” 

“I know. I didn’t think anyone could get more arrogant than Sento...” 

The comment makes him smile. It’s the first one in days.

To think he thought Sento was nothing more than an egoistical jerk with a big brain, and that Sento once thought he was nothing more than a hot-blooded idiot with eager fists. Yet they grew together together, inextricably like twisted vines. 

“Are you gonna sleep in my room tonight?” Misora asks. 

Banjo takes a deep breath.

“Yeah.”  

.

 

“I guess this was too much to ask for a supporting cast member like you.”

 Banjou nearly sobbed when Sento said those words. Splayed behind him the ground, the sun glittering off his new form, Banjou felt like was seeing heaven for the first time. Sento pummeled Utsumi until he broke down in anguish. They returned to Nascita triumphant for the first time in weeks. Banjou hadn’t felt this happy since Sento beat Seito in the proxy battle. 

On the battlefield, Grease welcomed him back with a slap on the shoulder. When they entered the cafe, Misora noticed the change in Sento’s demeanor immediately and rushed to give him a hug. Sawa soon joined her, and they both asked Ryuga to join too. Sento told Gentoku he was forgiven. 

As soon Sento enters their shared room, Banjou slams the door behind him and kisses him in a gust of passion. 

Sento doesn’t even have time to respond before Banjou withdraws, breathing heavily. His hands are shaking on the lapels of Sento’s coat. 

“Wow,” Sento says with a smile. Sento strokes the cut on Ryuga’s cheek. “You must have had a rough time without me.” 

 A smile breaks out on Banjou’s face, something warm and sincere that he can only ever muster for Sento. Tears well up in his eyes. “Don’t you ever leave me like that again, you idiot.”

“Looks who’s talking.”

Banjou has never been this fucking happy. He feels like his heart is going to burst out of his chest. Feelings this genuine were foreign. Banjou’s whole life he’d been lost, angry, with something he couldn’t quite name pent up inside him, buzzing like adrenaline under his skin, something twisted that could only be channeled into punches. With Sento, he feels content, complete, like his heart is full and he’d could die happy at any moment. 

“I broke our promise,” Banjo offers weakly. 

Sento holds his face in both hands and recaptures his lips. Banjou holds covers his hands with his own, and wants tremble with sobs of relief again.  

“It’s okay,” Sento reassures him. “There may not be peace … but there’s love.” 

.

 

 _I need you baby_  

 _And if it's quite all right_  

_I need you baby_

_To warm the lonely nights_

  _I love you baby_

_Trust in me when I say okay_

**Author's Note:**

> this ended up being a lot more angst-y than i intended. i had a great internal dialogue over whether or not to let banjo say fuck. 
> 
> first time writing for kamen rider! comments are super appreciated. follow me on twitter @_tlord  
> if you want to see me scream about how in love these two are. 
> 
> now, i'm gonna go make an amv with "can't take my eyes off of you"


End file.
